Here is a fascinating journal entry from the Rev. Francis Kilvert, who we have met before, visiting Bath from Langley Burrell near Chippenham.
Tuesday 30 September 1873
Went down to Bath with Dora [his youngest sister] by the 11 o’clock train. Lunched at Fortt’s with Thersie [their eldest sister].
Fortt’s was the premises now occupied by Waterstones, so you can picture exactly where they were. Going by the amount of detail that follows, they were probably sitting upstairs by the window.
In Milsom Street we met a procession of horsemanship and circus riders in spangles and tawdry tinsel, dressed as Circassians and Tartar horsemen in armour, preceded by the blasting and din of a brass band huddled in a gilt car dragged by miserable piebald horses, and followed by coarse-looking dirty women riders.
Kilvert’s use of the word ‘car’ here means a carriage, cart or wagon drawn by horses. His terms ‘Circassians’ and ‘Tartars’ (peoples of the North Caucasus and ‘Tartary’, as it was known in 1873, now part of Russia) are vague, evoking the people in the procession dressed in a variety of ‘exotic’ costumes. Kilvert’s description conveys disapproval, but it’s not clear of what exactly – is it the noise, the extravagant costumes, the ‘coarse-looking dirty women’? so unlike his decorous middle-class sisters who are watching this with him.
Upon a small pedestal on the top of a lofty painted car stood an angel with white silver tinsel wings, which shone and flashed in the sun. It was a poor pale thin girl with a flood of yellow hair and a worn anxious face with a terrified unhappy look that went to one’s heart. The rude jolting of the car made it very difficult for her to stand on her lofty perch and she held on in a frightened way and looked round and down anxiously.
This empathetic description of the Angel – he has looked really intently at this child, and understood her distress – lifts the diary entry from what, initially, seems a slightly snobbish “tut-tut” at this loud invasion of Milsom Street to a more considered understanding.
In the procession rode a very little man with an enormous and ridiculous mask and false head covered with a mane of coarse tawny hair. This infamous creature, part lion, part monkey, part devil, sat on his skewbald horse during a pause in the march and set all Milsom Street on a roar with his ludicrous and filthy gestures. Last of all came the Shah seated aloft in an armchair on the summit of a lofty triumphal car and dressed in the familiar headdress and uniform.
This is not, of course, the actual Shah of Persia – although interestingly, Naser al-Din Shah did tour Europe (including England) in 1873 and I expect there were illustrations in newspapers depicting his visit. So, if the person in the procession was dressed ‘exotically’ in imitation of the Shah, it would have been a recognisable cultural reference.
You would think that all this kerfuffle warranted a news item in one of the Bath papers, but I can’t find anything (and no prior advertisement announcing a procession, parade or circus). But there is a local election underway and the pages are full of it. In fact here is a poster in the collection of Bath Record Office which spoofs the election candidates as if they were performers and animals in a circus. Maybe the real circus in Bath was an inspiration for this?
There is one fleeting reference: in the Bath Herald 4 October, two men are before the magistrate following a fight on Tuesday 30 September. One of them is described as “entering the circus at Pulteney Road”. So this must be the circus that Kilvert saw earlier in the day along Milsom Street – but we don’t know which one. There were many small circuses touring provincial places: Charles Dickens’s novel Hard Times (1854) features a wonderful ramshackle circus run by Mr Sleary.
Two big circuses toured Britain at this period, Sanger’s and Hengler’s, but both are in the north of England at this date (looking at listings in The Era, the weekly trade publication for the theatre and entertainment industry). But we do know that Sanger’s came to Bath in July 1882, and their advertisement sounds very like the procession of 1873. And here are some marvellous photographs of Sanger’s performers.
Ann Cullis
Volunteer and Trustee
Reference for the 1882 advertisement:
Bruce Crofts Forgotten Year: News from Bath in 1882 (Bath City Council 1982)